Book of the week: Sonic Boom by Gregg Easterbrook

(Random House, $26)

It takes conviction to write a book about “the coming economic boom” in the throes of a worldwide recession, says Adrian Wooldridge in The Wall Street Journal. Yet Gregg Easterbrook is a born contrarian, and convincingly provides a “valuable corrective to the gloom.” Sonic Boom’s theme is that globalization is only in its infancy, and will yet “produce riches that none of us can imagine and scatter them more widely than ever before.” Our current woes are merely part of the global economy’s growing pains. In the long run, Easterbrook’s “conjectures are probably correct,” says Daniel Drezner in The New York Times. But he’ll have a hard time convincing pessimistic readers that the global slump is merely a “hiccup” in a period of unprecedented growth. And while Easterbrook “knows how to capture a popular audience,” the sonic boom metaphor he uses for globalization could also describe his writing style: “noisy, superfast, covering huge amounts of territory.”

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